Judgment of the Grave (20 page)

MONDAY, OCTOBER, 18

Pushing the stroller through the little stone pillars marking the entrance to the New Boston Cemetery in Lincoln, Sweeney wondered if she was doing permanent damage to Megan’s sensibilities, bringing her on a tour of graveyards of eastern Massachusetts in her infancy. Would she remember anything of it when she was older, all this communing with the dead?

“Hey, Pres?” she said. He was walking behind her, carrying her backpack and the milk shakes they’d stopped for at McDonald’s.

“Yeah?”

“Was it weird, growing up around all those monuments?” She stopped the stroller next to the path. “I mean, it must have been strange having friends over and stuff, right?”

“I don’t know.” He thought for a moment and she realized it was something she really liked about him, that he didn’t just answer questions any old way. He always thought about it. “It was kind of strange when people would come to pick them out and be crying and everything. But it was just normal for me, really.”

“I was worrying about bringing Megan to all these graveyards, but I suppose with a homicide detective for a father, chances are she’s going to be pretty screwed-up, anyway,” Sweeney said cheerily, taking Megan out of the stroller and putting her down on a blanket on the soft grass of the cemetery. Megan immediately crawled off the blanket and over to a slate stone with a beautiful carving of a death’s-head and an hourglass. Sweeney supposed she couldn’t do much damage to herself in the cemetery, so she blocked off the entrance with the stroller and set to work finding the six stones Whiting had carved in the Lincoln cemetery. George Whiting had listed them on his survey, and Sweeney wanted to add them to the Concord ones.

She was still waiting to hear from Hamish Jones about his spy information, but since she was taking care of Megan today, she’d decided to come out to the cemetery to document a few more stones mentioned on George Whiting’s survey. With these, she’d have a fairly complete list of Whiting’s stones in the area, with sketches and notes for each. She had thought it would be just her and Megan, but when she’d gone downstairs, Pres had been waiting for her in the lobby. “It’s a teachers’ meeting day today,” he said. “But my mom said I could hang out with you. Otherwise, I have to go to my gramma’s.”

Sweeney said he was welcome to come along. Now, she looked at the little map George had drawn and found them easily. They were all in a row, and had been commissioned for members of the Hardy family. The dates ranged between 1765 and 1774, and just like the rest of Whiting’s stones, they showcased the evolution of the death’s-head over time. On the earliest stone, which belonged to Henry Hardy, the death’s-head was fairly plain, but by the time it adorned the grave of young Liza Hardy, who had died at six years, two months in October of 1774, it had the wild hair and staring eyes Sweeney had come to know so well.

While they watched Megan crawling industriously around the graveyard, she and Pres photographed and sketched the stones and checked George Whiting’s list to make sure she hadn’t missed any. At the bottom of the page, she saw he had typed in “Stone for Mrs. Elizabeth Wheeler. Lincoln, 1776.” It couldn’t be a Whiting stone, because Josiah Whiting was dead by 1776. Or at least he wasn’t making stones anymore, Sweeney told herself.

Cecily Whiting had told her that Whiting’s son had taken over the business. It must be that he had made the stone, and perhaps his early designs closely resembled those of his father’s before he developed his own style. That had to be it. She found herself wondering about the son. What had he been like? What had he thought about his father’s disappearance? She flipped back through her notebook to the notes she’d taken from her conversation with Cecily Whiting. Cecily hadn’t been able to tell her very much about Josiah Whiting’s family, but there were the copies of the family letters she had given Sweeney.

Sweeney retrieved Megan from a far corner of the cemetery and put her on the blanket with a selection of toys from her diaper bag. Then she and Pres sat down on the blanket next to her and drank their milk shakes.

“Pres, have you ever heard your mom or your grandfather talk about spies?”

“Spies? Like James Bond?”

“Well, Revolutionary War spies. Like Benedict Arnold and those guys.”

“There’s an exhibit at the museum about the spies during the Revolution,” Pres said. “It’s really cool. There’s this whole thing about how they used these masks to send secret letters. My mom made me one that was shaped like a heart and she would write me these funny letters that I could only read if I held them up behind the mask.”

“Yeah.” She tried to think of a way to ask him about Josiah Whiting without bringing up Kenneth Churchill. “You don’t think Josiah Whiting could have been a spy, do you?”

“I don’t know, maybe. But why would he be a spy? I mean, it seems like he was pretty into the whole war thing. But I guess you would be if you were a spy, wouldn’t you?”

“Maybe. Have you ever looked at the Whiting family gravestones?”

“Yeah. They’re in the Hill Cemetery.”

“You want to see them again?”

He looked over at her. “Sure,” he said with a shrug. He was wearing a blue sweatshirt that seemed too tight on him, and his face was puffy and pale. Sweeney felt a sudden flash of concern for him. “I’ve got nothing better to do.”

He led her right to them. The stones were situated near the back of the cemetery, Rebecca Whiting’s in the center and her four children and their spouses buried nearby. Sweeney had been half expecting some spectacular examples of American stonecarving, but the stones were very plain. By the early 1800s, gravestones had gotten a lot less interesting, Puritan symbolism abandoned in favor of more secular designs, and the Whitings’ stones were replete with willow trees and urns, simple inscriptions, and not a single Medusa head among them. It was almost disappointing.

She had read all of the other stones when she came to Lucy Whiting’s. It was at the far left of the row, a small, child-size stone bearing the name and the dates of the child’s life, September 2, 1772, to August 30, 1774. She had been only a few days shy of her second birthday. Infant and toddler deaths were exceedingly common in those days, and you couldn’t walk around an eighteenth-century cemetery very long without stumbling over the graves of children. But Sweeney always found them sad, and today she found Lucy Whiting’s grave sadder still. Maybe it was all the time she’d been spending with Megan. Maybe it was that she felt as though she’d come to know Josiah Whiting and his family.

“Do they always use little ones for kids?” Pres asked, standing quietly by her side and reading the stone.

“Oftentimes.” She knelt down and inspected the stone. It featured a simple design at the top, scrolled shells intertwined with flowers and a pattern of starbursts traveling down the sides, and as she stared at it, she realized there was something familiar about the carving.

“Pres,” she said. “I think Josiah Whiting made this stone. Look, the starbursts are on a few of the other ones we’ve seen and the way he carved the letters. I didn’t notice it right away, because there’s no death’s-head, but it’s definitely one of his.” She turned to Pres, excited, but he was looking off across the cemetery, lost in thought.

“You okay?” He seemed off today, more tired than usual.

“Did you ever think about what kind of gravestone you want to have?” Pres asked suddenly, tracing the outlines of one of the African-mask faces.

“Are you kidding? People always ask me that question when they find out what I do. For a long time, I hadn’t thought about it, but now I have an answer I give, though I’m not sure it’s what I’d choose anymore.” Pres looked at her expectantly. “Okay, I have this idea for a really
big
gravestone, like four or five feet tall—that probably means I have a big ego or something—and it would have a giant soul’s head on it, like that one over there, and it would just have my name and dates of my life and death. That’s what I’d like. Now I think I want to be cremated, though, so it would just be a place people could come if they wanted.” She wondered suddenly, Who would come? “Maybe they could put my ashes under it too.”

Pres thought about that for a minute and then said, “I don’t think I want to be cremated. I tried to tell my mom, but she started crying and she wouldn’t really listen.” He looked up at Sweeney. “Could you tell her…if…you know. You know her now, so she would listen to you.”

Sweeney studied him for a moment. She weighed a thousand lame assurances and then, finally, just said, “Okay. I will.”

Sweeney and Megan walked Pres home and then headed back to the inn. Megan fell asleep on her shoulder, so Sweeney ordered tea in the lounge and decided to learn a little bit more about the Whiting family.

She had looked at the copies of the family letters Cecily Whiting had given her, but hadn’t seen much of anything relating to gravestones. Most of them were addressed to Whiting’s wife, Rebecca, and seemed to be letters from her mother or sisters focusing on household goings-on. But there were three letters from Josiah Whiting to his wife, and Sweeney took them out and read them carefully. The first one, dated June 15, 1772, was written in a beautiful, flowing hand.

The second letter was dated May 1, 1773, and also seemed to have been written during a trip away.

The final one wasn’t dated and Sweeney read it through a couple of times, but it didn’t make any sense to her.

Sweeney read through the letter a few more times, trying to figure out what it meant. It sounded as though they had some kind of fight or something and he was trying to make up to her. Or it may have been some kind of private joke between them. But in any case, there wasn’t any more information about the family. She would have to keep looking.

Quinn decided to start by calling Tucker Beloit’s commanding officer, a guy named Lieutenant James Hegman. He had gotten the name from Don and Ann Beloit, and while he knew he could probably get contact information from the Defense Department, he figured he’d try the easier path first. So he turned to the computer on the desk Andy had given him to use, Googled “Lt. James Hegman” “U.S. Marines,” and came up with a whole list of hits. He tried the first one and found a personal website someone had made to commemorate a reunion of Marines who had fought under Lieutenant James Hegman in Kuwait. Bingo.

There was a picture from the reunion on the site and Quinn studied it carefully, trying to make out the faces. After scanning the caption, he was certain that neither Kenneth Churchill nor Tucker Beloit was in the picture. But one of the names was Lieutenant James Hegman and whoever had written the caption had helpfully added in “Plano, TX.” Quinn popped that into the Internet White Pages and came up with a listing for James and Leeane Hegman in Plano and wrote down the number. He found a new notebook in the top drawer of the desk and dialed the number. A woman’s voice, rich and mellow with Texas rhythms, answered after the third ring, and when Quinn said he wanted to talk to Lieutenant Hegman, she said, “He’s at work, hon.”

“Oh, could you leave him a message for me?”

“Course I could, hon. Or you could call him at the office. I can give you the number.”

Quinn said that would be great and copied down the new number in his notebook, then dialed.

“Hegman here.” He had the same Texas accent his wife did, rich and long.

“Lieutenant Hegman. My name is Detective Tim Quinn and I’m a cop out here in Massachusetts. I’m helping the Massachusetts State Police look into the murder of a man named Tucker Beloit, and according to his parents, he served under you in the Gulf War. Is that right?”

There was a long silence and then Hegman said, “Shit. I haven’t heard anybody say his name in years. Tucker Beloit? Who murdered him?”

“Well, that’s what we’re trying to figure out. Can you tell me a little bit about him?”

There was a long silence. “Only thing you need to know about Tucker Beloit is that he was sick in the head. I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead, but he was. He wasn’t all there, and they never should have let him join up in the first place.” There was another long silence. “But they did, and I had to deal with it.”

“When did you first meet him?”

“Boot camp. This was before the war started. He joined up in November, I think, and I got to know him pretty well. He was real gung-ho. You know the type. He was always talking about how proud he was to be a Marine. He was a strong recruit, but he wasn’t much of a team player. That was the first thing I noticed. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to work with the other guys, but it was like he just didn’t have it in him. He thought of everything in terms of how he could get some personal glory out of it. I took him down a few pegs, really broke him down and built him back up again, and he was a lot better then, but I still always felt like I had to keep an eye on him, you know?

“The ground war started in February and we went right in at the front. We were a reinforced artillery regiment, and mostly what they wanted us for was to conduct these nighttime raids on the Kuwaiti border. We would get coordinates and we would head in and fire on a couple of targets and then get out before they could fire on us. It was like that night after night. Tucker seemed like he was doing okay. You know, he was really into what we were doing, just…gung-ho is really the word. But the thing is that in a wartime situation, that’s what you want. So I was very willing to let it go.” He paused then, and Quinn had the feeling that he was thinking about what to say. “You go over there? To the Gulf?” he asked finally.

“No, sir,” Quinn said. “I’ve got a buddy here working on the case with me, though, who did.”

“Well, I only asked because I’m trying to figure out how to explain why I didn’t do something about him before…well, before what happened. See, there’s something about being out in the desert. It just plays with your sense of things. There’s so much of it and it all looks the same, and you kind of forget. Well, you forget stuff that you might remember if you were back home.

“Anyway, we were doing some reconnaissance and before we left camp, Tucker took me aside and told me that he hadn’t wanted to say anything but that he thought Hank Giordano might be talking to the enemy. It was kind of a weird thing to say because there wasn’t any enemy around. It was just us out in the middle of a huge desert, and sometimes we ran across civilians or our guys, and sometimes we had to, you know, kind of take guys down because we weren’t sure who they were, but it wasn’t like there were Iraqi soldiers hanging around camp or anything.

“So, we went out on the mission and as we were creeping along in the desert, I suddenly heard someone say something. I pulled them up and went back and it was Tucker and he was fighting with Giordano. We were in the middle of a mission and I couldn’t afford to work it out then and there, so I told them to go back to camp and we continued on.” Quinn heard him take a deep breath. “When we got back to camp that night, I went to find them so we could figure out what was going on. This was pretty serious stuff. They’d put the mission in jeopardy, not to mention completely disobeying orders. I was pissed and I called for them. Tucker came kind of slinking around one of the tents and he came over and he looked me in the eye and he said, ‘Lieutenant Hegman, sir. You can find Corporal Giordano’s body in tent number five, sir.’ And then he saluted me. It was the creepiest thing, that salute. I said, ‘Excuse me?’ and he just kept on looking at me with those cold eyes and I knew, I knew. Damn it! He didn’t even have to tell me. But he said, ‘I told you sir, he was trying to talk to the enemy, sir. He was a spy. I executed him. I did my duty, sir.’” There was a long pause and then Hegman went on. “They sent him home and I never heard anything more about it. I swear to God. I thought there might be a court-martial or something. I even thought my head might be on the chopping block. But nothing. At some point I realized they’d just hushed up the whole thing. I don’t know what they told Giordano’s family. Probably accidental discharge or friendly fire or something. I wrote ’em a letter later, just telling ’em what a good guy he was, but I tell you, to this day I don’t know if they know what happened.”

“Did you ever hear anything about a guy named Kenneth Churchill?” Quinn asked him.

“Churchill? That rings a bell for some reason. Maybe.” But he didn’t sound convinced.

“He was a Marine. Fought in the Gulf too.”

“That could be it. I could have come across him at some point.”

“Could you think about it? It seems like he may have something to do with Beloit’s death and we’re just trying to track down any connection between the two of them. Like, say, that he was friends with Corporal Giordano or something.”

“Yeah, yeah, of course. Let me do some looking through my things. I kept a journal when I was over there. Might be something in there.”

“That would be a big help,” Quinn said.

“I tell you. I didn’t know what to think. You hear about these things, you know. In Vietnam, guys would kind of go off. The pressure got to be too much. But this was the Gulf War. I mean, we hardly lost any guys. It was supposed to be in and out. That’s what everybody said.

“The thing about war that I didn’t know about before I went over there is how many people die because of things that have nothing to do with fighting. You know what I mean? Hell, we lost more guys in car accidents and stuff like that than we did to the enemy. Anyway, I’ll look through that journal and get back to you if I find anything.”

Once Quinn was off the phone, he sat and thought about the conversation for a minute. Hegman might have heard of Churchill, but maybe he should try to come at it from the opposite angle. Not did Tucker Beloit know Kenneth Churchill, but did Kenneth Churchill know Tucker Beloit?

He called the main number at the inn and asked to be connected to Beverly Churchill’s room. When he told her who it was, she said, “Did you find him? You found him.” He could hear her breathing hard, the fear evident in her voice.

“No, no. I’m sorry. There’s no news. I was just wondering if you could tell me a little bit more about your husband’s service in the Marines. When was he deployed during the war?”

“’Ninety-one to ’ninety-two,” she said. “I don’t remember the exact dates, but he went back in right after the invasion.”

“Where was he stationed?”

“I don’t remember exactly. He talked about being on the Kuwaiti border. That’s all I remember.”

“Do you remember what his company was called?”

“No, but I can find out for you. It’ll be at home somewhere.”

“Thank you. I was also wondering if you knew who any of your husband’s Marine buddies were. Was there anyone who he stayed in touch with after he got back?”

“Oh. There were a couple of guys. One who came and stayed with us once. Bob something. I could probably find it for you. He was from Colorado or Montana or something. He was kind of a hillbilly type, really, different from Kenneth, though Kenneth had grown up like that and I think he felt comfortable with him. But after he came and stayed with us, he and Kenneth didn’t really stay in touch anymore. I think that he saw how we lived and that Kenneth had a good job, and maybe he realized they didn’t have as much in common anymore.

“Anyway, there was also a guy who lives around Leominster somewhere, Athol, I think. He and Kenneth used to get together a lot. Not so much in the last few years, but Kenneth really liked him.”

“Do you remember his name?”

“Yeah, it was kind of a funny name. I think he must have gotten made fun of a lot as a kid. Francis Pebbles. Frank, Kenneth called him.”

“Can’t be too many Francis Pebbles in Athol, can there?”

She laughed, and for a second he imagined her face, the blue eyes turning up in amusement. “No,” she said. “I bet you can get it from Information.”

But as it turned out, Information had no record of a Francis Pebbles. Quinn sat there, trying to figure out what to do, then got the number for Athol Town Hall and asked the woman who answered if she knew of a Francis Pebbles. He was an old friend from the Marines, he said, and he happened to remember that Frank had lived in Athol. Would she know where he could find him?

“Frank? Oh, it’s probably listed under Laurie’s name. Laurie Ferrano. That’s his sister. Hang on, I’ve got a phone book here, let me see if I can find it.” He could hear her flipping through pages and then she came back on and gave him the number. “Good luck,” she said kindly before hanging up.

Frank Pebbles wasn’t home, but Quinn left a message on the answering machine and was typing up his notes from the conversations when Andy came in, looking downcast. “You find anything?” he asked Quinn.

“Nothing great,” Quinn told him as he sat down. “But I got the story on Beloit. He went crazy while he was over there, started accusing one of the guys he served with of being a spy for the Iraqis and then he killed him. Shot him dead one night while the rest of the unit was out on patrol.”

“Jesus,” Andy said.

“The commander said that he got sent home and the whole thing was kept pretty quiet. He’s not sure the family even knew what really happened, which was backed up by our conversation with the Beloits. It looks like he and Churchill were both deployed on the Kuwaiti border around the same time, but that doesn’t tell us a whole lot. Hegman didn’t think he knew Churchill, but the name rang a bell for him. He said he’s not sure why, but he’s going to think about it and get back to me. So, it looks like there may be a connection. I’m not counting on it, though. It’s a common enough name.”

Andy sat on the edge of the desk and turned to look through the window. “I knew a couple of guys who went crazy over there. It just got to them, the sun and the sand. They couldn’t hack it. The way I look at it, it’s tough on everybody, you know. You just have to deal with it and do your duty.”

“How about you? Anything on the credit card?”

“Yeah, we found an employee who said she’s eighty-seven percent sure—I swear, that’s really what she said, eighty-seven percent—that she remembers the credit card. Her mother’s maiden name was Churchill and she remembered wondering if they were related when she ran the card through. A miracle, really, when you think about how many cards they run through. But she says it was a young kid who used it.”

“So, it was stolen, or he gave it to someone.”

“Yeah, which means he could be anywhere right now.”

“I know.”

“It’s weird, I didn’t know how much stock to put in the girl’s story. I don’t know about this thing with the mother’s maiden name. But she remembered that he had a little penguin earring in one of his ears. He was—”

“Wait a second, did you say he was wearing a penguin earring?”

“Yeah. Why?”

Quinn was up before Andy had finished talking. “Because Kenneth Churchill’s teenage son has a penguin earring too. I saw it the first day I went to talk to Mrs. Churchill.”

Andy’s eyes were wide. “You sure about that? A penguin? Like Chilly Willy, or whatever that cartoon is?”

“Yeah. Like Chilly Willy,” Quinn said, grinning. “We can get him in here and you can see it for yourself.”